el_dev_hell

> Have you used Adderall or any other similar drug?

Yes. Addreall, Ritalin, and Dextroamphetamine.

> If so, how did it go?

I went to my GP and asked for a psychiatrist referral. I didn't (and still don't) consider myself ADHD, but I wanted to see if it really was that easy to get a diagnosis and prescription for prescription stimulants (I was in uni and thought it would help).

The psychiatrist asked me a collection of questions related to motivation, sticktoitiveness (this was years ago and I still remember that awful word), and general life engagement. I answered them all honestly.

After 30 mins of chatting, he gave me a choice of three stimulants and recommended I try them all to find the best one for me personally. I started with Ritalin. In the end, I settled on Adderall as the "best" for me.

My main comments to anyone considering this path:

- They work. I don't think anyone disputes the effectiveness of stimulants for focusing. You will be more focused and able to work for a good 8-12 hours on whatever you can thing of (I forget to eat/drink).

- You do form a dependance. After two months of daily (mon-fri) use, I would get the urge to take a morning dose on Saturday/Sunday. Whenever that happened, I would freak out and stop taking anything for a few months (in retrospect, thank god!).

- There is a comedown the next day/when it wears off. If you take extended release (like most versions of Adderall), you'll get a "stream" of release all day. Other varieties (like the normal Ritalin version) require redosing every 4ish hours otherwise you crash. You can avoid the next day foggyness by redosing (obviously a terrible long-term idea).

- After 30 days of use, you might become aggressive/depressed. This was my case. It was before hitting the weekend craving, but my brain chemistry was doing all kinds of goofy things and I'd start lashing out at friends for minor reasons. I know friends that took Adderall and didn't have this effect, but keep it in mind.

- Both Ritalin and instant-release Dexamp are insane drugs. I get a serious buzz/peak from them. I get a tingling sensation and actually feel high. I used Ritalin 4-5 times to study. It worked, but I stopped touching it out of addiction fear. After taking Ritalin throughout the day, I had the urge to redose in the evening (Adderall didn't cause that for me).

I wouldn't touch them as an adult for general productivity. The risk/reward spread is bad IMO.

You beat me to it!

I'm interested in keeping this meme going (in the direction of the original article).

Anyone else jumping on the bandwagon? Don't miss out -- this could be the next coinbase thread.

Throwing in my anecdotal experience.

I noticed something very similar. About 25% of one-on-one conversations are now in Signal. Another 25% are in iMessage, which is a very easy sell for iOS users.

I've had a terrible time with group chats. One large chat is occurring in iMessage (very poor experience). Another large chat is occurring in Discord, which has been fantastic, but it changes the dynamic and caused a few friends to ghost (the onboarding to Discord is harder for newcomers vs. iMessage, WhatsApp or Signal IMO).

Interesting question.

Honestly, I've never had trouble finding problems to solve (in life overall). Maybe one day I'll have a problem deficit and will need to go looking.

I try and focus on my most high impact problems and attack them. I attack problems in the normal engineer way (break it down, solve, solve, solve, break down further, solve, move up the problem tree).

Not directly related to the past year, but I had something similar happen a few years ago.

The company I was working for had a fairly bad year (not "we're gone" but "we only grew 1% vs the usual 15-20%"). An email went out from the CEO advising no salary increases would happen that year.

I was 2 years in and due for a performance review.

In the performance review, I asked for a raise of 7% and highlighted the reasons. My manager countered with "we can't do raises this year". I countered with my performance for the last year and asked if he could review and let me know by the end of the week (the meeting was on a Monday).

He called a meeting with me on the Thursday and gave me the raise. He also asked me to keep it private.

My main lesson was: Don't accept blanket rules. Unless you're in government, you should still ask for the raise.

Damn! That's certainly novel.

Nice work.

In Australia, they're known for very well built fridges and aircon units.

I probably should have been more explicit with my issue. This is the part that rustled my jimmies:

> and in any case, Darwin did not have the mathematical ability to understand it.

I really enjoyed the article overall.

The section on Darwin was an eyebrow raiser. It makes sense to include someone like Darwin (very interesting and well known), but he's not a great example to compare to "normal" people (like the couple mentioned in the opening paragraph).

A 50 year old in the 1800s whose job was catching a ship to the other side of the planet is a little different when compared to a factory worker, software engineer, doctor, etc.

Also, what the fuck is this off-hand remark:

> Unfortunately, Mendel’s work was published in an obscure academic journal and Darwin never saw it—and in any case, Darwin did not have the mathematical ability to understand it.

> Also a weird tip is change jobs every 2 to 3 years. Companies tend to get less cushy and more process oriented over time.

Hell is an agile sprint system that has been optimised to require 10 hour days.

Language is so interesting.

You read the parent comment and took it as throwing shade. I read the parent comment and took it as pragmatic admiration.

Agree with? No.

But I don't have a better alternative for many applications, so I'm onboard just based on that fact.

> I got a counter-offer, took it, stayed for 3 more years, never regretted it.

After you had already resigned? Glad it worked for you. I had a horror show and have met several people in similar situations.

> Also, I complain A LOT to my managers about what sucks in the company. They seem to like having someone open and honest when talking to them.

Sounds like you work for a very decent company. Do you think that's a better strategy than STFU (not being a dick, I actually would like to know your opinion)?

I'm one of those people that move jobs more often than you do (roughly once every 2-3 years).

I prefer to arrange an in-person meeting with my direct manager. If that's not possible, Zoom/other video platform.

If it's impossible to get facetime in some capacity, phonecall/email is a last resort.

Always on a Friday. Ideally in the afternoon (3PM).

I rip the bandaid off quickly and tell them I've decided to move on and X day will be my last with the company (don't bury the lede). I thank them for being great. I talk a little about why I'll miss the team and company overall.

Generally, the manager will want to notify the team. If it's going to be more than a week in the future, I tell my closest work colleagues and ask them to keep it quiet for the "formal" announcement.

We then start the handover process. Document anything major that's fuzzy. Finish anything that you can. Don't be one of those people that coast for the next 2-4 weeks and do nothing.

During the exit meeting, I never throw shade on the company. SHUT YOUR MOUTH. There is no benefit to YOU by unloading all the issues with a company. Sure, it might help them, but you will be leaving a bad taste in their mouth, which may come back around in the future (be selfish - shut up). I outline my reasons (almost always it's money, remote work options, or leaving to join a scrappy startup with a nice equity package).

If you get a counter offer (after resigning, not during a normal salary negotiation), do not take it. You will regret it, trust me.

Agreed.

As someone that lived in Cambodia where "tea" money (a nice way to say bribe) is very common. It was unsettling every time.

> Understand labor exploitation and avoid being a victim of it.

Do you have any general tips?

Yeah, I agree. Avoiding apologies is probably a good idea for the company. The part that stuck with me was the "acceptable" pseudo-apology.

Not apologised at all comes off better than a backhanded apology IMO.

You're right about it being a tricky attempt at faking an apology.

But the below isn't correct:

> Right, so the company is saying "I will never acknowledge our mistakes because if I do we might have to fix them."

I probably didn't word it perfectly in my original comment, but the company did acknowledge mistakes quite often after assessments of the claimed faulty/broken/whatever product (roughly 30% of faulty claims were approved and either repaired or reimbursed from memory). The rejected claims were often taken to court (like 15%) due to the value of products.

I was mostly commenting on the deception of only allowing pseudo-apologies.

> Apologizing just gives fuel for revenge. In this case I think because the harm done was so small, it was economical to apologize.

Yeah, it's always a tradeoff.

I worked at a non-tech fortune 500 for a few years and was able to see the inside of repair/warranty/disputes. These were very high ticket items and the brand was/is very highly regarded for after sales support.

In the employee handbook for repair support staff (the people communicating with clients about the status of their repair/claim) there was a passage similar to the below:

"Apologies MUST NOT acknowledge anything other than the customer's explicit feelings without written acknowledgment of fault from $MANAGER".

I asked a member of that team to decipher WTF that meant, and they showed me an example email. They were only allowed to apologise in the below way:

"Hi bob, we're sorry you feel our product is faulty".

I always found these weasel apologies infuriating in my personal life.

Certainly possible (I'll report back if that's the case).

I think the argument by @ddtaylor is more probable (that Twitter is using a "trust score" type metric to determine account suspensions).

Adding to the above, which is pretty accurate for a personal evaluation.

Don't share that "math" with the employer during your negotiation.

Very interesting.

I'm also in Australia and have found your perspective to be identical to mine.

Unrelated undergrad + IT/CS Masters usually equals "I want money" or "X was terrible so I'm falling back to something safe". Obviously, that's not always the case, but it has been in many interviews (and a few hires).

Tested with a personal tech project account and that's not the case for me.

That's a pretty cool idea.

Do you have any live examples?

Since there's not much of a spec (past users on newish devices), I would default to:

* Next.js - React on the frontend with endpoints handled by Next.js.

* Postgres for the DB

* Hosted on Vercel (unless otherwise specified).

* S3 for binary files.

If the project scope was anything past what Next.js APIs can reasonable handle (heavy DB migrations required, an admin panel, etc), I'd go with:

* Django Rest (or Django Graphene for GraphQL if it's a better fit) on the backend.

* React on the frontend (possibly still with Next.js if server-side rendering is high priority).

* Postgres for the DB.

* Frontend hosted on Netlify or Vercel.

* Backend hosted on Elastic Beanstalk, DB hosted on AWS Aurora, and S3 for binary files.

* Jira for work allocations with a solid source control integration. On the human side, a well defined structure to how branches/commits/merges must operate.

* Code formatting. A decision is made and everyone follows (by force from the formatter) a single formatting methodology. In JavaScript land, Prettier is great. Python has Black, which is alright. The biggest benefit is making code reviews easier.

* A standing desk raiser. I would prefer a walking desk, but I haven't made time to set it up.

Not to defend Facebook, but a failure to opt-out is not really the same as volunteering.

I find the argument made by Facebook to be sound. They're making a comparison between Google crawling the web and indexing content vs. a news site intentionally posting their content to Facebook.

The difference between getting your webpage crawled and explicitly posting on a public forum is significant. I read their comment as "users explicitly post contend on Facebook vs. passively having their content scraped by Google".

> I think this is actually an interesting point because the US did lose the war but if the winner writes history, then why do so many think they won?

How common is that belief on a whole?

In Vietnam or China, it's common knowledge (and celebrated) that Vietnam won the war.

In the US, I can't imagine talking to someone over 40 that's unaware of how the war ended.

<rant>

You hit the nail on the head.

After work drinks on Friday are enjoyable because they're informal and not (usually) arranged as a company initiative. It's a chance to let off the work related stress with a group of people in a similar situation while being on neutral territory.

Don't want to come to Friday after work drinks? Sweet, have a good afternoon. I'll be smashing a pint with/without you.

Friday Zoom drinks from 5-6PM can die. No, I don't want to sit in a quasi-optional meeting with 25 people arranged by HR/management. It's not comparable to shooting the shit with a selection of staff that have formed a connection organically.

The best way to determine the success/failure of Friday drinks is the percentage of people still present at 6:05PM. It's at least 50% below the 5:55PM number. At a local bar/pub, it's pretty stable until 7-8 and you're usually an hour past talking pure "work" shit.

</rant>

Our PM claims to have spoken with Microsoft and they signaled a keen interest in coming onboard (the dodgy hand gesture made by the PM).

https://apnews.com/article/business-satya-nadella-australia-...